Cost-Benefit Analysis for Local Integrated Facsimile/Data/Voice Packet Communication Networks

Corporate planning for the automated office requires an increasing awareness of productivity improvement offered by control of office costs. A model for analyzing the cost tradeoffs involved in adding terminals to the communication channels of a local, centralized store and forward computer network for facsimile, data, and/or voice packet switched transmission is presented. The overall cost-benefit analysis is comprised of the three models: customer requirements, network constraints and cost-benefit. The customer requirements model contains six submodels, i.e. load, processor, software, support, terminal, and telecommunications. The network constrains model is composed of the following submodels: computer node submodel, channel submodel, and terminal submodel. The cost-benefit model computes costs for links, terminals, message transactions, and their related cost-benefit ratio, given the final inputs from the network constraints model.